Alfred Sisley: The Unheralded Impressionist

GREENWICH, Conn. — A reforming spirit swept through art history in the 1970s, when an academic discipline that once prized close looking above all else began to think about matters beyond form and symbolism. To truly see French painting of the late 19th century, historians averred, you had to understand their social history too — the urban reconstruction witnessed by the bourgeois Parisians in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte, or the health laws that regulated Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s prostitutes, or the class divisions expressed by the clothes of Georges Seurat’s Sunday parkgoers.

It was a huge development in the history of art, but it had a side effect: Some significant painters, less socially engaged than Manet or Degas, ended up consigned to the B-team.

Alfred Sisley (1839-1899) is one of those painters. He was included in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874; he showed with the leading Impressionist dealer Paul Durand-Ruel; and he maintained a close friendship with Monet even after leaving Paris for the suburbs. But Sisley’s near-exclusive focus on landscape has meant that he now appears, fairly or unfairly, largely in the shadow of the big boys who called modern art into being in the mid-1860s. A retrospective at the Bruce Museum here, the first Sisley show in the United States in more than two decades, offers a chance to focus on an artist who may not be in the first rank of French artists but who deserves greater attention.

There is a dependability to Sisley’s painting. The 50-odd works here depict the Île-de-France region that surrounds Paris, as well as a few British sites, with delicate, divided brush marks and soft light effects rendered with daubs of gray and white. If his earlier paintings are a little tighter and his late ones a bit freer, there is nothing here like the wild, proto-Abstract Expressionist mark-making of Monet’s final years. Sisley was an atmosphere guy, and like almost all his colleagues, he painted en plein air, taking his canvas and palette to the banks of the Seine or to towns west of Paris. As for the figures, whether peasants in a landscape or pleasure-seekers in a boat, they are uniformly faceless, and sometimes depicted as just a few patches of flesh tones in acres of blue and green.

Sisley was born in Paris to expatriate British parents; he lived in France almost his entire life. In his 20s he began painting landscapes in the forest of Fontainebleau, where an earlier generation of French artists — Camille Corot, Théodore Rousseau, Charles Daubigny, and the other members of the Barbizon school — began to imbue landscape painting with greater subjectivity. An undistinguished early genre picture, from 1865-66, sees Sisley follow Corot’s example in depicting flowering trees as a curtain of specked pigment.

Most of Sisley’s early work is gone. His house in the Paris suburbs was occupied by the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian War, and in a letter to a friend he said he lost everything he owned. As a Briton, Sisley didn’t fight, but we know he went to Paris, and he surely would have had contact with fellow artists, fighting for the doomed French Army. (The most famous art-world casualty was Sisley’s friend Frédéric Bazille — a retrospective of whom is at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington this April.) When the war ended, Sisley returned to Île-de-France, where he grew interested in depicting the suburbs with the sensitivity once reserved for the countryside. A painting of the port in Marly, flooded after the Seine burst its banks, unifies sky, water and a cafe into an allover undulation of pigment. Only rarely do his landscapes disclose the transformations that the Industrial Revolution was wreaking. On a trip to London, Sisley ventured out of town and visited Hampton Court, where he painted a newfangled bridge from below, its cast-iron struts framing a Thames of blue and white blotches.

The palette in these postwar paintings is a uniform one of blue, gray, white and green. He becomes a bit more experimental with his colors in the 1880s, and brush strokes get slightly freer, as well: Trees are stippled with a perpendicular brush rather than merely smeared horizontally. I don’t want to overstate any break in style, though. As the Post Impressionists were preparing their emotional onslaught, Sisley stuck with what he knew, even if there was slightly more gesture in the riverside grasses and snowy skies he painted toward the end of his life. One of his final paintings, done on a beach in Wales during stormy weather in 1897, has sand of mauve breached by white waves, and almost recalls the chromatic experiments of Edvard Munch.

This exhibition, curated by the Sisley scholar MaryAnne Stevens, plots Sisley’s art not only through time but through the Île-de-France region, which Sisley shuttled across as his interests changed and his money woes deepened. If your view of modern French painting inclines to only Paris and Provence, this show will introduce you to a new peri-urban geography of places physically on the cusp of the French capital but socially far removed. Argenteuil, Sèvres, Saint-Cloud, Villeneuve-la-Garenne: those suburbs Sisley painted are places that contemporary Parisians now see from the scratched windows of the R.E.R. express trains, and while some remain fancy bourgeois commuter towns, others are now ringed by tower blocks. Remembering that these towns are not eternally bucolic may help contemporary viewers find greater relevance in Sisley’s serene prospects. The landscape is never just the landscape; society is written across it too.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, a picture caption on Friday with an art review of “Alfred Sisley (1839-1899): Impressionist Master” at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., misstated the title of one of the works shown and carried an erroneous credit. The work is “Spring at Bougival,” not “The Rue de la Princesse, Louveciennes.” (Both paintings are circa 1873.) The image of “Spring at Bougival” is courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, not the Phillips Family Collection.